Irish poker runs out of hotel function rooms — and four of the Irish Poker Tour's sixteen festivals are at one hotel in Clondalkin
We read the Irish Poker Tour's festival calendar and then every host venue's own website. Nine rooms carry the whole tour, eight of them hotels or event halls with no permanent poker tables, and the Green Isle Hotel at Newlands Cross hosts four festivals including the IPT Final and The Monster. The tour's own "upcoming events" index is also carrying three festivals that have already been played.
Ireland's live tournament poker has an unusual shape. There is no circuit of card rooms behind it: the Irish Poker Tour, which is the calendar for most of the country, plays almost entirely in hotel function space and event halls, and the tables come down again when the festival ends.
We read the tour's festival index on 6 October 2026 and then went to each host venue's own website. Sixteen festivals are listed, running between nine venues.
One hotel carries the tour
The Green Isle Hotel at Newlands Cross in Clondalkin, on the south-western edge of Dublin beside the N7, hosts four of the sixteen — the Dublin Winter Festival in November, the IPT Final over New Year, the Dublin Spring Festival in March and The Monster over the May bank holiday. No other venue has more than two. It is a hotel with conference rooms, not a card room: there is nothing to sit down to there between festivals.
The largest guarantee of the season is not in Dublin at all. The Gleneagle Arena on the Muckross Road in Killarney takes the Killarney Festival from 13 to 18 October 2026, advertised above EUR 750,000 — ahead of the Galway Poker Festival at the Galmont Hotel in January 2027 at EUR 450,000+ and the IPT Final itself.
Two venues get two dates each: the Castletroy Park Hotel in Limerick (the Treaty Festival in January, the EUR 60K Weekend in April) and the Radisson Blu in Letterkenny, whose autumn Donegal Poker Festival in late September was advertised at EUR 90,000+, a bigger number than several southern stops.
The exception, and a name worth being careful with
Only one Irish venue on the calendar is an actual card room: the Eglinton Casino in Galway, which takes the Galway Winter Festival from 3 to 6 December 2026 at EUR 60,000+. Galway therefore has two tour stops six weeks apart in two different rooms.
Anyone searching for it should know that a separate online gambling site trades as "Eglinton Casino Club (Dublin)" on a similarly spelled .ie domain and has nothing to do with the Galway venue.
The calendar is carrying ghosts
Three of the sixteen festivals on the tour's "upcoming events" page have already been played: the Athlone EUR 30K In A Day at the Athlone Springs Hotel on 22 August, the Limerick EUR 30K In A Day at the Castletroy Park on 5 September, and the Donegal Poker Festival at the Radisson Blu Letterkenny from 25 to 27 September. The pages are still live and still listed as upcoming. If you are planning a trip from the index page rather than the individual festival pages, check the dates.
The one stop outside Ireland is Glasgow: the Glasgow Poker Festival at the Alea Casino, 3 to 8 November 2026, GBP 350,000+ with a GBP 200,000 Main Event — and, confusingly, a first bullet that starts the night before the advertised opening date.
Read the original at Irish Poker Tour →
Frequently asked questions
Does Ireland have poker card rooms?
Very few on the tour calendar. Of the nine Irish Poker Tour host venues, only the Eglinton Casino in Galway is a card room; the other eight are hotels or event halls where poker runs for a festival and then stops.
Which IPT festival has the biggest guarantee in 2026/27?
The Killarney Festival at the Gleneagle Arena, 13–18 October 2026, advertised above EUR 750,000.